He does this almost a half dozen times over the next hour in a Green Bay sports medicine clinic as he follows up on injuries and surgeries, or evaluates patients for the first time.

Henry, an orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist at Aurora BayCare Medical Center, is a long way from where he was 14 years ago, when he worked as an orthopedic surgeon at Forward Operating Base Speicher near Tikrit, Iraq.

There, among the more routine injuries, he also treated bullet wounds, blast injuries from improvised explosive devices and injuries from landmines.

“We learned how to manage and how to quickly triage these patients, prioritize the treatment and manage these patients the best we can,” Henry said. “We were providing life- and limb-saving treatment, often stabilizing open fractures then sending those patients on," usually to a hospital in Germany.

Henry is one of more than 2 million U.S. and coalition military members who served in Iraq since the war started March 19, 2003, fifteen years ago.

The conflict and its aftermath has lingered for more than decade and left hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded and a country where the government is making progress, but some say, remains weak.

The war left 4,400 American service members dead and almost 32,000 wounded. There is a wide range of estimates of the Iraqi dead — between 150,000 and 460,000 people. Through 2014, the war had cost about $815 billion, according to Congressional Research Service.

It also impacted the lives of those sent to fight.

Laura Colbert spent more than a year in Iraq with a Wisconsin Army National Guard unit between 2003 and 2004. Almost 15 years later, the mother of three says she’s 98 percent of who she was before her time in the war.

“But there’s that piece of me that will never be the same,” Colbert said.

A member of the U.S. Army Reserve with the Milwaukee-based 452nd Combat Support Hospital, Henry's three-month Iraq deployment in 2004 was wedged between deployments to Afghanistan in 2003 and 2008.

This deployments tested him as a physician, he said, and 15 years later he still brings the lessons he learned to his work every day.

“Having seen just the worst possible orthopedic injuries, terrible blast wounds, amputated limbs and life-threatening injuries … I know when I walk into the emergency room there’s going to be no patient with an injury beyond my ability to provide high-quality care,” he said.

War in Iraq

The initial U.S.-led air and land campaign in Iraq lasted three weeks. U.S. military operations in Iraq would drag on longer than anticipated, another eight years and counting, as coalition forces sought to stabilize the country. So even after “major military operations” were curtailed in May 2003, fighting continued and eventually grew into a full-fledged insurgency.

The justification for the war, vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction horded by the Saddam Hussein regime, didn’t materialize.

Army trainers instruct Iraqi Army recruits at a military base on April 12, 2015 in Taji, Iraq.(Photo: John Moore, Getty Images)

Unlike in World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War, a relatively small portion of the American public has felt the impact of the Iraq War firsthand. With no draft, the war in Iraq was carried out by an all-volunteer military, many of whom have done multiple tours of duty. Today, more than 5,000 troops are still stationed there.

“There’s a huge number of Americans who have no connection to the (military personnel) over there,” said Michael Telzrow, director of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum in Madison. “When it goes on for a long time, it becomes background noise in a sense. You don’t have connection to individuals who are over there like you would have in World War II.”

“I think it’s better to talk about it now than in another 10 or 15 years, particularly if you’re talking to the veterans themselves — our memory doesn’t get any better when we get older,” Telzrow said. “For historians, you need some time to pass before you … come to conclusions and understand the true meaning because things are still unfolding.”

From college to Baghdad

Colbert (Laura Naylor during her time in Iraq) joined the Wisconsin Army National Guard six months before Sept. 11, 2001, out of a desire to serve her country, find adventure, stay physically fit and to help pay for college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Almost two years later, she was in Iraq with the 32nd Military Police Company working with, and training, Iraqi police units in and around Baghdad. She was shot at, logged countless hours in a fighting position waiting for threats, was a Humvee driver in convoys hit by improvised explosive devices, escorted diplomats, and saw the human toll of a massive bomb explosion at a Baghdad police station in the fall of 2003.

Laura Colbert, a Waupaca native, served in Iraq with the Wisconsin National Guard in 2003 and 2004.(Photo: Submitted photo)

Colbert, a 36-year-old Waupaca native who spent about 14 months in Kuwait and Iraq, has told her story to groups and individuals more than 150 times in the hopes of relating the reality of her war to people half a world away who experienced it only through increasingly small TV news clips and articles in print publications.

“It’s been a completely voluntary experience, and if you don’t have anyone in your life that has been in the military you have no connection to what’s happening,” she said. “It’s not in the news very much anymore. Even when I got home, it wasn’t news anymore.

“My fear is … it’s going to be a misunderstood war,” Colbert said. “We have students now born after both of these wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) began and it’s just background noise, something that’s been going on their whole lives.”

Colbert, who is an assistant principal at Waupaca Middle School, said her most vivid images from Iraq are from the October 2003 car bombing of the al-Sha’ab Police Station where she worked. It was, she said, a turning point in the war.

“We got there and it was beyond catastrophic,” she said. “I was right by the building where there were homes and I watched as the fathers were carrying their charred and burned children out of their homes, crying and distraught.”

She felt guilt, linking the bombing to the invasion and presence of American GIs.

“It just festered inside of me, the feeling that it was our fault, even though it wasn’t,” Colbert said. “You’d see these kids playing in the street day after day… and now I know they’re gone forever because of our occupation.”

Laura Colbert, a Waupaca native, served in Iraq with the Wisconsin National Guard in 2003 and 2004. She's seen here with money being escorted to pay Iraqis(Photo: Submitted photo)

Colbert returned from Iraq in the summer of 2004 and went back to school but had a lingering depression, something others in her unit said they also experienced. The weight of the months in Iraq caught up to her during a simulated firefight at sergeant’s school in the late summer of 2005.

“I couldn’t get my mind back to this is fake… I couldn’t get out of this horrible place my mind was going,” she said. “I just couldn’t get back to Fort McCoy where we were. I couldn’t get my mind straight.”

She says telling her story is a form of therapy and she’s working on a book — “How to Pee Standing Up” — about her experience.

Support groups, like Desert Veterans of Wisconsin, have formed at the local level to support veterans, while state and national organizations like Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America keep focus on veterans issues — including care for post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury — and legislation and assistance for the broad scope of people who served in those wars.

Life after war

Colbert said the experience helped shaped who she is today, giving her more confidence and less fear of the unknown — like global travel.

"It was hell on Earth for a long time while we were there, but I'd do it again, because that's who I am today," she said. "I can't imagine my life if I was still in Madison with none of these experiences I've had."

Laura Colbert with her husband, Garrett, and children.(Photo: Submitted photo)

Strife in Iraq continues 15 years later. The country endured the 2003 invasion a, civil war, and religious oppression and mayhem wrought by the so-called Islamic State terror organization, or ISIS.

More than 5,000 U.S. military personnel remain in Iraq. Iraqi forces supported by the U.S. military recently fought another campaign to reclaim territory captured by ISIS.

Like other veterans, Colbert and Henry frequently think of their time and the people they worked with in Iraq.

“It’s life-changing,” said Henry, who splits his time between medical facilities in Green Bay and Manitowoc. “I don’t dwell negatively on some of the tough experiences, but it’s changed my life — mostly for the better.””

The 48-year-old Manitowoc resident who grew up near Green Bay said he feels like his work in both Iraq and Afghanistan mattered.

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Dr. Jon Henry(Photo: Sarah Kloepping/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)

“I felt all of my deployments, including the one to Iraq in 2004, that we as a hospital, and myself as a orthopedic surgeon, made a difference for individual patients and for the overall mission,” Henry said.

For both soldiers, the prolonged nature of the conflict is frustrating.

“There’s lot of frustration and sadness when you hear there are still troops suffering injury and loss of limb and life and we’re still spending countless dollars on this effort,” Henry said. “We all have to ask if this is worthwhile and accept it’s a question beyond me. I know I did my part and did my service the best I could .”